The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (78 page)

CD: Ivo Zidek (Skuratov); Charles Mackerras (cond.).
Decca 430 372 2

Béla Bartók

(1881–1945)

Bluebeard’s
Castle
(
Duke
Bluebeard’s
Castle,
A
kékszakállú
herceg
vára
)

One act. First performed Budapest, 1918.

Libretto by Béla Balázs

Bartók’s only opera, composed in 1911 and based on the fairy-tale by Charles Perrault and Maeterlinck’s play
Ariane
et
Barbe-Bleue
(adapted into a fine opera by Paul Dukas in 1907).
Like his two ballets
The
Miraculous
Mandarin
and
The
Wooden
Prince,
Bluebeard’s
Castle
is a sinister and opaquely allegorical treatment of the mysteries of the relations between human beings.

Bartók dedicated the opera to his new wife Marta – it was not, one might suppose, the most endearing or encouraging of wedding presents.

Plot

Bluebeard ushers his new wife Judith into his castle.
It is dark and gloomy, and Judith craves some light.
She sees seven doors and asks Bluebeard for their keys.
Reluctantly, he hands over the first two: behind them lurk a torture chamber and an armoury, both of them stained with blood.
Then he allows her a third and fourth key – these open on to a treasury and a garden, both bloodstained too.
A fifth door opens to reveal a blaze of light, and the vast expanse of Bluebeard’s kingdom.
Bluebeard begs Judith to stop there, but her curiosity is irresistible.
The sixth door reveals a lake of tears.
Judith now insistently asks Bluebeard questions about his past loves and the seventh door.
She soon realizes that he has murdered them all, and that it is their blood that she has seen.
Bluebeard hands over the final key, and from the seventh door emerge the ghosts of three of his dead wives.
Bluebeard hails them as the loves of dawn, noon and evening, but tells Judith that she is his
love of night, and the most beautiful of them all.
She takes her place alongside the other dead wives.
The seventh door closes and Bluebeard is left alone in the darkness.

What to listen for

The text is written in the poetic metre of old folk ballads, and the score seems mistily archaic as well as aggressively modernist. It radiates a uniquely sinister atmosphere, the result of Bartók’s fascination with the exotic modes of Hungarian folk music and the kaleidoscopic colours and harmonies of Debussy’s
Pelléas
et
Mélisande.
The casual listener will not notice, but through its episodes, the score follows a cycle of keys and esoteric harmonic correspondences.
Note the ‘dripping blood’ motif (the interval of a minor second), and the way that Bluebeard’s vocal line seems limited in range and melodic variety, whereas Judith’s is constantly volatile and excitable.
Whose side are we meant to take in this psychological battle?

Judith can be taken by either soprano or mezzo-soprano, Bluebeard by either bass or baritone.

In performance

Although this is an opera which works magnificently in the mind’s eye and is often played as a concert piece, it also offers great opportunities for imaginative staging and design: a celebrated production by Robert Lepage in Toronto made much from the simple idea of a blank wall and gradually increasing levels of light; others have exploited more obvious images of Austro-Hungarian decadence and art nouveau.

A problem this opera poses is the Hungarian language’s peculiar system of stresses, un-Latinate roots and propensity for long portmanteau words make the text intractable to any translation.
A spoken prologue, explaining that what follows is a parable of mankind’s inner nature, is often omitted.

Recording

CD: John Tomlinson (Bluebeard); Bernard Haitink (cond.).
EMI 5561 622 2

Dmitri Shostakovich

(1906–75)

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
(Katerina Ismailova)

Four acts. First performed Leningrad, 1934.

Libretto by Alexander Preys and the composer

This opera enjoyed huge success in Soviet Russia (and internationally) until in 1936 an article in
Pravda,
commissioned by Stalin, condemned it as tuneless, coarse, primitive and contrary to the dictates of the socialist realist aesthetic.
It was then withdrawn, only re-emerging in 1963, during the more liberal Krushchev era, in a version retitled
Katerina
Ismailova,
shorn of its harder and more cynical edges.
Over the last thirty years, however, the magnificent original version has been universally reinstated.

Plot

In the Russian provinces in the mid-nineteenth century, Katerina is unhappily married to the boorish merchant Zinovy.
Her father-in-law Boris berates her for her failures as a wife.
Zinovy goes away on business, and Boris humiliates Katerina further.
Sergei, a handsome new worker, arrives and gets involved in an attack on Zinovy’s housekeeper.
When Katerina attempts to quell the disturbance, Sergei challenges her to wrestle with him.
Boris is appalled to discover Katerina in this compromising situation.
That night, Sergei knocks on the door of Katerina’s bedroom and asks to borrow a book.
He then proposes a resumption of their wrestling and soon seduces her.

Boris catches Sergei as he leaves the bedroom and beats him up.
He then demands food from Katerina – she gives him some mushrooms that she has laced with rat poison.
After revealing his murderer, he dies in agony, and Sergei and Katerina resume their love-making, interrupted only by the appearance of Boris’s louring ghost.
When Zinovy returns, Sergei and Katerina murder him too, hiding the body in the cellar.

Katerina and Sergei are about to be married when Zinovy’s body is discovered by a peasant hunting for alcohol.
They are arrested at the wedding by some pompous police.
Katerina and Sergei are sent to Siberia.
On the road, they quarrel and Sergei, resentful of the way Katerina has ruined his life, goes off with another woman, Sonyetka.
Katerina pushes Sonyetka into the river and jumps in after her.
Both of them are drowned, and the convicts continue on their way.

What to listen for

A
tour
de force
for the orchestra, as one might expect from one of the century’s great symphonic composers.
The overall tone is garish, brilliant and aggressive, and the pace swift, with the level of excitement intensified by the use of pounding ostinato and the ‘Keystone Cops’ scene in the police station providing grotesque comic relief.
Katerina is a tremendous role for a strong soprano who can keep the audience’s sympathy for a desperate woman.
Note the graphic eroticism of the sex scene at the end of Act I (conveyed by sliding trombones), the gloomy passacaglia in Act II and the fierce dignity which elevates the final scene.
The influence of Mussorgsky’s
Boris
Godunov
and its Shakespearean ability to modulate from comedy to tragedy and back again is omnipresent.

Shostakovich originally conceived the opera as the first of four treating the theme of the sufferings of modern womanhood, but was too demoralized following the attack in
Pravda
to pursue the project.

In performance